Myth: My family will be charged if I donate my organs.Fact: The organ donor's family is never charged for donating. The family is charged for the cost of all final efforts to save your life, and those costs are sometimes misinterpreted as costs related to organ donation. Costs for organ removal go to the transplant recipient.

@Blah the law is for Wales which, like the rest of the UK, has the national health service. A state health service and the donation register applies to the NHS - not private medicine. As such your comments about people who are rich enough to afford transplants are irrelevant. Nobody is talking about this law in the US AFAIA so there's little point in discussing it as if they were.

And as for the question "Why do I need to pay to opt out?" well you don't. You pay your contributions to the NHS through your taxes as normal you don't pay more if you opt out of organ donation.

"Why is it OK for me to be auto opt-in on organ donation, but I can't get universal health coverage to keep said organs healthy?" In the UK there is universal health coverage, funded through taxes so the poor pay less than the rich. But of course US citizens apparently don't want that sort of system.

"How did Steve Jobs get a transplant at his age and with his additional health problems?" Well if he lived in the UK he'd have been just as likely to get it as anybody else.

"So why is it OK for rich folks to use the normal folks as organ donators, while the normal folk can't depend on the rich to get universal healthcare in place?" I think you know the answer to that. The US is a state where most people didn't want a system that would present exactly what you're talking about.

In Texas, it used to be printed on our drivers' licenses. They would ask you when you'd go to renew. Then, around 2000 or so, they stopped doing that, and instead you had to fill out an organ donor card and put a sticker on the face of the license itself. The sticker almost immediately came loose, when you took your license out of your wallet, and was an enormous pain. I finally emailed Texas DPS and asked why they no longer asked at the license bureau, and actually got an answer: people apparently were complaining that they felt "coerced." Just by being asked whether or not they wanted to be a donor.

Now, Texas has gone to a system where they ask if you want to be a donor, and that information is coded into the magnetic strip on the license (but I carry a donor card too, just to be sure). I used to be rather lukewarm with regard to organ donation, and then I read a book called "From Death To Dust" by Kenneth Iserson, that made me a true believer.

The most powerful weapon we have is education. People are woefully ignorant about organ donation. A friend of mine used to swear up and down that "everybody knows" that if you're an organ donor, the paramedics won't really try to save you.

I guess the bottom line is that I think an opt-out system is an excellent idea.